EARTH HOME TO WILLIAM STAFFORD 255The sharp swallows in their swerve
After the spring and all, new life strikes, those sw’s stirring tongue and lips. Swal-
lows out of nowhere, bladelike pointed wings and tail, swerve to avoid things
but unerringly go on seeking. A loaded word, “swerve” figures in Stafford ’s
“Traveling through the Dark,” when he finds a dead doe on a narrow canyon
road. He could leave her there, but for the next traveler, “to swerve might make
more dead.” The doe carries an unborn fawn—can he salvage something?
“I could hear the wilderness listen,” he says, “I thought hard for us all—my
only swerving—, / then pushed her over the edge into the river.” In another
poem, “The Swerve,” Stafford ’s father dies in a car crash. So this word marks
emergency, like the swallows
flaring and hesitating
Think of their wheeling flight path, flaring out like a flamenco skirt. Or like
aircraft “flaring,” as birds skimming turf or fresh-turned soil suddenly fan their
wing and tail feathers to tilt and plunge upfor a still moment,
hunting for the final curve
Do birds hesitate as we do? They hunt, our nerves can sense this. For them, the
final curve captures an insect. To us, “final” feels foreboding,
coming closer and closer—
The birds’ circlings and superhuman vision drive this c ...c ...cpulse, like a
strobe going on and off at sixty cycles per second, which seems slow to swal-
lows. In full flight they dart their heads to catch insects or falling raindrops. This
predatory skill may threaten the felt-but-not-heard speaker. Meanwhile the stan-
za’s four participles, unslowed by commas, still settle on no finite verb. A dash
again keeps the energy open—as do this poem’s curious rhymes. And instead
of rhyming second and fourth lines, giving his stanza a solid stance, Stafford
rhymes the odd lines one and three: “sound / ground,” “swerve / curve.” Each
stanza leaves us leaning across a break, toward
The swallow heart from wing beat to wing beat
No sentence has ended yet, but again a new stanza capitalizes “The.” We ’ve fo-
cused in from “sharp swallows,” something visible, to a single “swallow heart,”
a small creature ’s even tinier organ. After “coming closer and closer,” more
repetition stretches the poem’s longest line into a heartlike pulse, “wing beat
to wing beat”
counseling decision, decision:
Once again an ongoing participle with no closure in sight, plus another repeat-
ing pulse: “decision, decision.” But now two changes occur. What ’s been a